A taut, appealing, and often quite funny exploration of existential angst.
Every house in the country keeps a room ready in case the president should need it. He never enters most of them, so what happens when the president does come to call and an ordinary boy from an ordinary house becomes “the boy the president visited,” singled out by an attention he cannot hope to understand?
In his first novel to be translated into English, Argentine writer Romero advances a conversation begun by Camus, Kafka, and Calvino. Every household here keeps a carefully curated room set aside in anticipation of the president’s visit. Though the poorer apartments in the city center do not adhere to this tradition, the book’s teenage narrator, an avatar of unconscious suburban affluence, assures the reader that every house “owned by people like us” keeps a room reserved or “they lose their privileges.” What these privileges are no one knows. How the custom began no one remembers. Just as no one recalls what led to this unnamed country’s banning basements in the narrator’s grandparents’ time because “terrible things used to happen before, in the basements,” and no one seems to quite know how old the president is, how long he has been in power, or anything else about him other than the size of his nose, which “looks like a potato, and…that’s why he has a moustache.” In this way, Romero weaves together the implacably known world of late childhood—a place of favorite household nooks, favorite vantages in front yard trees, uncontemplated routines that are ordered according to the mysterious reasoning of parents and teachers—with all that is impossible to know about the adult world that looms on the narrator’s horizon. Romero’s unnamed narrator is believable and affecting—filled with the bodily insouciance of his age as he shinnies up trees and pads around the house in the dark—but also afflicted with the feverish dread of the eternal questions: Why this life? Why these customs? When the president finally does come to make use of his room, the narrator is pushed out of observation and into a kind of nebulous action, coming to no definitive conclusions but placing himself in a position where enlightenment will have to find him, if only because he is standing in its way.
A taut, appealing, and often quite funny exploration of existential angst.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9997227-2-2
Page Count: 82
Publisher: Charco Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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